Wrestling and The End of
History
Paul A. Cantor
When the great Parisian Hegelian Alexandre
Kojéve searched for an image of the end of history,
he finally hit upon the Japanese tea ceremony.
Coming from Brooklyn, I am a bit less
sophisticated and turn to American professional
wrestling instead. For wrestling has been as much a
victim of the end of the Cold War as the
military-industrial complex. It is not just that the
demise of the Soviet Union deprived wrestling of
one set of particularly despicable villains. The end
of the Cold War signaled the end of an era of
nationalism that had dominated the American
psyche for most of this century. Like much else in
the United States, including the power and prestige
of the federal government itself, wrestling had fed
off this nationalism. It drew upon ethnic hostilities
to fuel the frenzy of its crowds and give a larger
meaning to the confrontations it staged.
The state of professional wrestling today thus
provides clues as to what living at the end of
history means. It suggests how a large segment of
American society is trying to cope with the
emotional letdown that followed upon the triumph
of capitalism and liberal democracy. If the vast
wrestling audience (some 35 million people tune in
to cable programs each week) is a barometer of
American culture, then the nation is in trouble.
Indeed, the very idea of the nation-state has
become problematic. For wrestling has been
denationalizing itself over the past decade, replacing
the principle of the nation with the principle of the
tribe.
The erosion of national identity in wrestling reflects
broader trends in American society. If one wants to
see moral relativism and even nihilism at work in
American culture, one need only tune in to the
broadcasts of either of the two main wrestling
organizations, Vince McMahon's Worldwide
Wrestling Federation and Ted Turner's World
Championship Wrestling. (It is no accident that one
of the pillars of professional wrestling is Turner's
cable TV empire, which also brings us CNN, the
anti-nation-state, global news channel.) Both the
WWF and the WCW offer the spectacle of an
America that has lost its sense of national purpose
and turned inward, becoming wrapped up in
manufactured psychological crises and toying with
the possibility of substituting class warfare for
international conflict. And yet we should remain
open to the possibility that contemporary wrestling
may have some positive aspects; for one thing, the
decline of the old nationalism may be linked to a
new kind of creative freedom.
ii.
The history of pro wrestling as we know it begins
after World War II and is roughly
contemporary–not coincidentally–with the rise of
television. Wrestling provided relatively cheap and
reliable programming and soon became a staple for
fledgling television stations. By the 1950s-and well
into the '60s and '70s-wrestling was filling the
airwaves with ethnic stereotypes, playing off
national hostilities that had been fired up by World
War II and restoked during the Korean conflict.
Wrestling villains–always the key to whatever
drama the bouts have–were often defined by their
national origin, which branded them as enemies of
the American way of life.
Many of the villains were at first either German or
Japanese, but as memories of World War II faded,
pro wrestling turned increasingly to Cold War
themes. I wish I had a ruble for every wrestling
villain who was advertised as the "Russian Bear,"
but the greatest of all who bore that nickname was
Ivan Koloff. Looking for all the world like Lenin
pumped up on steroids, he eventually spawned a
whole dynasty of villainous wrestling Koloffs. The
fact that the most successful of them was named
Nikita shows that it was actually Khrushchev and
not Lenin or Stalin who provided the model for the
Russian wrestling villain. Time and again the
Russian wrestler's pre-fight interview was a
variation on "Ve vill bury you." Nikolai Volkoff
used to infuriate American opponents and fans
alike by waving a Soviet flag in the center of the
ring and insisting on his right to sing the Soviet
national anthem before his bout began.
To supplement its Russian villains, wrestling turned
to the Arab Middle East, where a long tradition of
ethnic stereotyping was readily available. During
the years of tension between the United States and
Iran, wrestling hit paydirt with a villain known as
the Iron Sheik, who made no secret of his
admiration for and close personal ties to the
Ayatollah Khomeini. His pitched battles with the
All-American GI, Sgt. Slaughter, became the stuff
of wrestling legend. Not to be left behind by the
march of history, during the Gulf War the Iron
Sheik reinvented himself as Colonel Mustafa, and
suddenly Americans had an Iraqi wrestler to hate.
The extent to which wrestling relied on national
identity to manufacture its villains should not be
overstated. Some of the greatest villains were
home-grown, like Nature Boy Buddy Rogers, and
some of the greatest heroes were foreign-born, like
Bruno Sammartino. But although ethnic
stereotyping was not essential to the emotional
dynamics of wrestling, it did play a crucial role.
That is why the end of the Cold War threatened to
deliver a serious if not mortal blow to the whole
enterprise. Suddenly audiences could not be
counted upon to treat a given wrestler automatically
as a villain simply because he was identified as a
Russian. There was a brief, almost comic era of
wrestling glasnost, during which the promoters
tried to see if they could generate drama out of the
shifting political allegiances of the Russian
wrestlers. The extended Koloff family was riven by
internal dissent, as some sided with Gorbachev and
the reformers, while others remained hardliners and
stuck by the old regime. But since Kremlinology
has never been a popular spectator sport outside
academia, the public quickly grew bored with trying
to sort out the internal politics of the Koloff family,
and it began to dawn on the wrestling moguls that
the end of the Cold War was a threat to their
franchise.
This problem was compounded by the fact that at
roughly the same time as the Cold War was ending,
ethnic stereotyping began to be anathematized. By
the early '90s, the WWF even seemed to be testing
whether it could capitalize on the new era of
political correctness. With Russia and virtually
every other country ruled out as a source of
villains, Vince McMahon and his brain trust
searched the globe to see if any ethnic group
remained an acceptable object of hatred. The result
was a new villain named Colonel DeBeers–a white,
South African wrestler with an attitude, who spoke
in favor of apartheid during interviews. One can
almost hear the wheels grinding in McMahon's
head: "Russians may no longer be fair game, but no
one will object to a little Boer-bashing." But
wrestling fans did not take the bait. This was one
of the few times the WWF misjudged its audience,
proceeding as if its fans were sipping chardonnay
and sampling brie instead of guzzling beer and
munching on nachos. Colonel DeBeers was a flop
as a villain and in some ways marked the end of a
wrestling era–a last, desperate attempt to base
physical conflict in the ring on political conflict
outside it.
iii.
Wrestling promoters have always been concerned
that theirs is not a team sport and thus threatens to
lack that extra measure of fan commitment that
group solidarity can extract. Exploiting nationalist
feeling had been one way of turning wrestling into
something more than single combat. Instead of
rooting for the home team, fans viewing a Sgt.
Slaughter/Iron Sheik bout got to root for America.
Or rather, America became the home team.
But there was also a germ of a team concept in
wrestling's peculiar institution of the tag team-a
bout in which two wrestlers pair up against a
couple of opponents. And as ethnicity faded as a
principle in wrestling, the WWF and the WCW
began to expand tagteam partnerships into larger
groupings that might best be described as extended
families or tribes. The wrestlers in such tribes pool
their resources to advance their careers, often
illegally entering the ring to come to each other's
aid, softening up each other's opponents for future
matches, and generally creating trouble for any
wrestler not within the tribe. These wrestling tribes
adopt an outlaw pose within their larger leagues,
refusing to conform to league rules and challenging
the duly constituted wrestling authorities. The most
famous of these groups is the New World Order
(the nWo) within the WCW, which was headed by
Hollywood Hulk Hogan and is constantly trying to
outwit the league owners and take over the
organization. It is surely one of the ironies of the
end of history that in the aftermath of the Gulf
War, that "vision thing" of George Bush's has left
no more lasting monument than the name of a
group of renegade wrestlers.
Tribal organization gives wrestling something
intermediate between national identity and a purely
individual identity. Fans almost have the sense of
rooting for teams, since the wrestling tribes often
have their own logos, uniforms, slogans, theme
songs, cheerleaders, and other badges of communal
or team identity. The wrestling brain trusts create
ongoing storylines involving the various tribes, so
that the future of the whole league, perhaps its very
ownership, can seem to depend on the outcome of
a given bout.
Thus the newly created tribal identities in wrestling
can serve as substitutes for the old national
identities. But one thing is missing–any sense of
stability, the reassuring feeling of continuity that
used to be provided by ethnic stereotyping in
wrestling. Once a Russian, always a Russian, and,
until the era of glasnost, that also meant always a
villain as well. National identity is not a matter of
choice; one is born into it and stuck with it, unless
one chooses to betray one's national origins (at the
height of the Koloff confusions, charges of "traitor"
were routinely hurled back and forth in interviews).
But in the world of wrestling today, which group a
wrestler affiliates with appears to be a matter of
personal choice (though in fact these "choices" are
still scripted by the league). As it happens, the
traditional national identities in wrestling were often
made up. Both the "Manchurian" Gorilla Monsoon
and the "Oklahoma Indian" Chief Jay Strongbow
were in actuality Italian-Americans (Robert Marella
and Joe Scarpa respectively), and the wrestler
known as Nikolai Volkoff began his career as Bepo
Mongol. In the contemporary era, though, wrestling
virtually acknowledges that it is manufacturing its
villains, and their roles are presented as a matter of
personal choice rather than national destiny.
Thus pro wrestling takes its place along with the
plays of Samuel Beckett and the buildings of
Michael Graves as an example of the dominant
cultural mode of our age, postmodernism. The
characters in Beckett's plays are not meant to
represent real-live human beings, who might be
said to lead an existence independent of the drama.
Rather they are revealed to be fictions, consciously
constructed characters who are themselves
sometimes dimly aware that they are merely
characters on stage. Graves's buildings are not
meant to be "true" in the way the triumphs of
modernist architecture were. Abandoning the
modernist dogma that form follows function,
Graves returns to architectural decoration,
reminding us that his buildings are after all human
constructions and thereby "deconstructing" them
before our eyes. Pro wrestling has similarly entered
its postmodern phase, in which it deliberately
subverts any claims to truth and naturalness it ever
had. Of course, at least since the era of television,
pro wrestling has always been entertainment rather
than real sport. But for decades pro wrestling at
least pretended it was real. It now admits its
fictionality, and indeed, like most forms of
postmodernism, revels in it.
But can we confidently say that wrestling simply
mirrors broader movements in our culture and
politics? It is difficult to look at developments in
politics and culture today and not see them as in
turn mirroring developments in wrestling. Was
Hulk Hogan, who dominated the 1980s, perhaps
our first taste of Bill Clinton? The Hulkster–who
could never talk about anything but himself, his
own career, and his standing with his Hulkamaniac
fans–was the model of a roguish, narcissistic,
utterly unprincipled performer. While changing his
stance from moment to moment, he was never held
accountable by his adoring public, to the point
where he seems to have gotten away with anything.
If postmodern wrestling was not a forerunner of
postmodern politics, why is Jesse "The Body"
Ventura now the governor of Minnesota?
iv.
When the villainy of wrestlers was rooted in their
national identity, their evil was presented as
inherent in their natures. Related to genuine
political conflicts in the actual world, the evil of a
Russian wrestler seemed real. But villainy has
become something more fluid and elusive in the era
of postmodern tribalism. Since the contemporary
wrestler appears to choose his tribal affiliations, he
also gets to choose whether to be a hero or a villain
(again, these matters are carefully scripted by the
WWF and the WCW authorities, but we are talking
about how things are meant to appear to the
wrestling public). The most striking characteristic
of post-Cold War wrestling is the dizzying rapidity
with which today's wrestlers switch from hero to
villain and back again. Wrestlers used to spend
their whole careers defined as either good guys or
bad guys. Now they alter their natures so often that
it no longer makes sense to speak of them as
natural heroes or villains in the first place. The
contemporary wrestler exemplifies the thoroughly
postmodern idea that human identity is purely a
construction, a matter of choice, not nature.
With its underpinnings in traditional notions of
morality, heroism, and patriotism eroded, wrestling
has turned to new sources to hold the interest of its
fans. Generally these sources have been found in
the dramas of private life. Televised wrestling has
always had much in common with soap operas.
Fans identify heroes and villains and get wrapped
up in ongoing struggles between them and
especially the working out of longstanding and
complex feuds. Throughout its history, pro
wrestling has occasionally sought to involve fans in
the private lives of its warriors. Once in a while a
wrestler has gotten married in the ring to his female
manager or valet. (More recently–reflecting a
loosening of morality–female companions of
wrestlers have been at stake in matches, with the
winner claiming the right to take possession of his
opponent's woman.) Personal grudges have always
been central to wrestling, but over the last decade
they have gotten ever more personal, often
involving family members who somehow get drawn
into conflict inside or outside the ring.
In short, wrestling conflicts have come increasingly
to resemble the appalling family feuds aired on The
Jerry Springer Show. This is only fair, since
Springer seems to have modeled his show on
wrestling interviews. Wrestlers used to get angry
with each other because one represented the Soviet
Union and the other the United States, and the two
ways of life were antithetical. Now when wrestlers
scream at each other, dark domestic secrets are
more likely to surface–sordid tales of adultery,
sexual intrigue, and child abuse.
Here a wrestler with the evocative name of Kane is
emblematic. Kane was introduced in the WWF as
the counterpart of a well-established villain called
the Undertaker, who often punishes his defeated
opponents by stuffing them into coffins (a nasty
case of adding interment to injury). Kane's aptly
named manager, Paul Bearer, soon revealed that
Kane is in fact the Undertaker's younger brother.
Kane wears a mask to hide the frightening facial
burns he suffered as a child in a fire set by his older
brother, which killed their parents. Thus the stage
is set for a series of epic battles between Kane and
the Undertaker, as the younger brother seeks
revenge against the older. Paul Bearer then reveals
that Kane and the Undertaker are actually only
half-brothers, and that he himself fathered the
younger boy, though he neglected him for years
and is only now acknowledging paternity. With its
Kane storyline, the WWF crafted a myth for the
'90s. All the elements are there: sibling rivalry,
disputed parentage, child neglect and abuse,
domestic violence, family revenge.
McMahon and his brain trust have once again
proven that they have a finger on the pulse of
America. In the wake of years of psychotherapy,
Twinkie defenses, and the O.J. trial, they have
reinvented the villain as himself a victim. No one
ever felt a need to explain the evil of Russian
wrestlers–they were presented as villainous by
nature. But unlike his biblical counterpart, Kane is
supplied with motivation for his evil, and therefore
inevitably becomes a more sympathetic figure.
After all, his problems started when he was just a
little kid. Kane is in fact a huge man named Glen
Jacobs: six-feet seven-inches tall and weighing 345
pounds. Yet when he climbs into the ring, he
stands as the poster boy for the '90s–the victimized
wrongdoer, the malefactor who would not be evil if
only someone had loved him as a child.
The other victim of society now celebrated by pro
wrestling is the poor, abused working man,
symbolized by "Stone Cold" Steve Austin,
currently enmeshed in a bitter feud with Vince
McMahon and the entire power structure of the
WWF. In his unceasing search for suitable villains,
McMahon finally hit upon the most villainous
person he could think of–himself. In the ultimate
postmodern convolution, wrestling now focuses on
itself as a business and makes its own corruption
the central theme of its plots. McMahon has
decided to build his storylines around ongoing
labor-management disputes in the WWF. He is in
constant public conflict with his wrestlers, trying to
force them to do his bidding and above all to make
his on-again, off-again champion Austin toe the
corporate line.
In his quest to gain an edge on Turner's WCW,
McMahon realized he could tap into the resentment
the average working man feels against his boss.
McMahon is always threatening to downsize the
WWF wrestling staff and has surrounded himself
with corporate yes-men. Austin is his perfect
working class opponent–a beer-drinkin',
foot-stompin', truck-drivin', hell-raisin' Texas
son-of-a-gun, always prepared to tell McMahon:
"You can take this job and shove it." With this
storyline, wrestling has completed its turn inward,
moving from the Cold War to class war. Ironically,
even at the height of the Cold War, wrestling never
went after Russian communism with half the fervor
it now devotes to pillorying American big business.
If wrestling is any indication, the United
States–deprived of any meaningful external
enemy–seems to have nothing better to do than
attack itself. Why not go after a bunch of tobacco
companies, for example?
The McMahon-Austin feud proved to be so
successful that Turner's WCW soon began
imitating it, using its chief executive, Eric Bischoff
(a former wrestler himself) to play the role of
corporate bad guy. Always one step ahead of his
competition, McMahon went on to fuse the family
soap opera aspect of wrestling with the class
warfare element by involving his son, his daughter,
and eventually even his wife in his corporate
struggles. These storylines have become
increasingly bizarre, with McMahon's son Shane
first seeming to betray him and then revealed to
have been secretly acting on his behalf all along,
and his daughter Stephanie set up for a kind of
wrestling dynastic marriage and then kidnapped
under weird circumstances. Who would have
thought a century ago when wrestling began with a
simple full nelson and a step-over toehold that it
would eventually culminate in a proxy fight? But
that is exactly what happened when McMahon's
wife and daughter shocked him by voting their
shares in the WWF to make Austin CEO, thereby
transforming the board meetings back in
Connecticut beyond recognition. (Austin brought a
case of beer to his first session as president.) No
wonder McMahon is about to take his corporation
public.
v.
Every time I think wrestling has reached rock
bottom, either the WWF or the WCW finds its way
to a new moral depth. A recent plot line culminated
in Austin holding a gun to McMahon's head in the
center of the ring, as the nattily attired
owner/operator of the WWF appeared to wet
himself in terror. When one looks at wrestling's
"progress" from the 1950s to the 1990s, one really
has to be concerned about America's future. If
wrestling tells us anything about our country–and
its widespread and sustained popularity suggests
that it does–for the past three decades we have
been watching a steady erosion of the country's
moral fiber, and America's growing incapacity to
offer functional models of heroism.
On the other hand, perhaps we should cease being
moralistic for a moment, recognize that wrestling is
only entertainment, and try to look beyond its
admittedly grotesque antics. Though it is tempting
to become nostalgic for the good old days of
American patriotism in wrestling, let's face it: The
traditional national stereotypes did become tired,
overused, and predictable. In that sense, the end of
the Cold War actually proved to be liberating for
wrestling, as one might hope it could be for all
American society. What appeared to be a loss of
ethnic stereotyping proved to be a gain in creative
freedom, as wrestling was forced to scour popular
culture to come up with alternatives to traditional
villains. Wrestling may not be more moral these
days, but it certainly is more interesting and
inventive. This development suggests that maybe
we all need to be thinking beyond the nation-state
as our chief cultural unit.
After all, the nation-state has not always been the
dominant form of cultural or even political
organization. It is largely a development out of
16th-century France, and has never as fully
prevailed around the world as historians would
have us think. There is no reason to believe that
the nation-state as we know it is the perfect or even
the best unit of political organization. When
Aristotle made his famous statement usually
translated as "man is a political animal," what he
really was saying is that man is an animal whose
nature it is to live in the polis–the Greek city
conceived as the comprehensive human
community, on a scale much smaller than a modern
nation-state. Thus Aristotle would have said that
the nation-state is an unnaturally large and even
overblown form of community.
Perhaps what appears to be the end of history is
only the end of the nation-state, and humanity is
now groping confusedly toward new modes of
political organization, which may be at once more
global and more local in their scope. Today's
professional wrestling points in these two directions
simultaneously. At any moment of deep historical
change, it is easy to become fixated on what is
being lost and fail to see what is being gained. The
way wrestling has been struggling to find some kind
of postnational identity reflects a deeper confusion
in our culture as a whole, but one that may portend
a profound and even beneficial reorganization of
our lives in the coming century. Perhaps, then,
when we watch–and enjoy–the WWF and the
WCW, we really are wrestling with the end of
history.
Paul A. Cantor is professor of English at the University of
Virginia.